I tend to do a lot of event organising at the moment, and I have one simple rule when it comes to organising a set of speakers to talk about anything digital: always get an American.

The thing about an American is that even if they're saying something spectacularly bland and obvious, there's something about that accent that just makes them seem more authoritative.

Wired is this principle in print. The very fact it is American and handcrafted in – swoon – San Francisco, is enough to make it into a tech bible regardless of what it actually delivers (fortunately, it does pretty much always deliver).

And so, when the last UK Wired launched (before I joined the Guardian) it immediately fell at the first hurdle when I saw they had replaced the back-page column by (swoon) Nicholas Negroponte, with one from BT futurologist Ian Pearson.

Yes, Pearson is a genius in his own right. But hell, he was based near Ipswich. What could he know?

Anyway, 12 years later Wired UK is back, from Condé Nast. And the world has moved on. Technology moves from cutting edge to mainstream in the bat of an eyelid – which is difficult when you have to deal with monthly magazine deadlines. My dad is now using Spotify. I don't think it had actually launched when this first edition of Wired was put to bed.

So how is it, you ask. Well, as you would expect from Wired, the small bits are great. I love all those little panels and espresso machine reviews. It is great to see a double-page picture of a deep-frozen F-4 bomber or one of those "how things work" diagrams of a 3D printer.

You also know you're in a healthily eclectic place when you see a piece on Will Oldham followed by a pic of Alain de Botton on a JCB.

My only gripe with the small bits is that a review of folding bikes without featuring the Brompton (or at least acknowledging that it has set the standard) is like a review of chocolate bars without mentioning Cadbury's Dairy Milk. But then I'm a Brompton owner, so I'm biased.

Overall, as you would expect from anything bearing the Wired moniker, it looks lovely. They like to describe it as a "beautiful object" and if you flick through it, it lives up to the billing.

But polish isn't just about how something looks. It's about the detail, it's about how things hold together – and dare I say it, actually read. And here I had a few troubles with the bigger bits.

The front cover carries the strapline "How the iPlayer saved the BBC". Sounds interesting. The headline to what is flagged a "Wired investigation" is "The man who saved the BBC" (that's a big difference) with a picture of Anthony Rose "the renegade South African licensed to upgrade the BBC". Now, I happen to know that Rose is the BBC's head of digital media technology (because I looked it up on Google), but I've read the piece three times now, and asked someone sitting next to me to read it, and I'm 99% certain they don't actually mention his job title in the piece.

I realise details such as job titles can probably be filed under "Tired" – but it matters, if you are telling a story about how something happened in a business. It's one thing if the chief executive makes it happen, another if it's the marketing director and another if it's the security guard.

And anyway, at least half of the piece is about Ashley Highfield. Why not chuck in Erik Huggers and call it the men who saved the BBC. And while we're at it – please could you specify exactly how it has saved the BBC? Like, it would have had to shut down without it?

Then we have the big cover feature. You can imagine the meeting: I know, we'll ask 50 brilliant people what they think it going to happen in the future. They're pleased with this one. So pleased that the 46 futurologists featured are right at the front of the book, before the feature – which is a bit confusing. They have laid things out by date. 2020 apparently is when humans visit Mars, even though the two futurologists interviewed say it will either be in the 2040s or in 2030.

Finally "The people who really run Britain" – no, not Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch, but the "shift workers who could bring the nation to a halt" such as the senior ventilation technician at Eurotunnel and the operations manager at London traffic control, the control-room supervisor at British Energy and the chief photographer at Reuters.

The chief photographer at Reuters? How did he sneak in? What calamity will happen to the nation if he has a sick day?

These are just niggles and gripes, but they jar as you scratch beneath the surface of this beautiful object. I'll buy the next one – and probably the next few after that. But most of all, I'll look at their website – which is really rather excellent and a very welcome addition to coverage of wired Britannia.

• Simon Waldman is the Guardian Media Group's director of digital strategy and development

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